Birdbrain

The woman behind the world’s chattiest parrots.

As the crowd at the Midwest Bird Expo waited for the cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg to take the podium, the hum of human chatter was punctuated by the sound of parrots whooping it up—twittering and letting loose with wolf whistles, along with the occasional full-out jungle squawk. The birds, many of them for sale, were displayed in cages just beyond the curtained-off stage, which was inside the main hall of the DuPage County Fairgrounds, in Wheaton, Illinois. Nobody seemed particularly distracted by the commotion. People were too busy pulling out their cell phones and showing one another photographs of their cockatiels back home. It was a warm Saturday afternoon in early April, and a woman in the folding metal chair in front of me, who was wearing large parrot earrings, said that she had driven all the way from Florida to see Pepperberg. Indeed, if this were a political rally, the audience would be Pepperberg’s base. Here were admirers who had sent in ten-dollar bills to help support her research with Alex, the African gray parrot that she worked with for thirty years; and here were people who, after Alex died, unexpectedly, of heart arrhythmia, on September 6, 2007, helped form an online community that comes together on the sixth day of every month to reflect about him.

Pepperberg, arriving onstage, picked up a microphone and said, “I have a feeling you all know how smart Alex was.” Everyone clapped in assent. (The parrot had appeared on television many times, mainly on PBS and the Discovery Channel.) She explained to the audience, which was largely middle-aged and female, that, in the late nineteen-seventies, when she started working with Alex—whose name was an acronym for Avian Learning Experiment—other scientists had been dismissive of her ambition to communicate with him. As she put it, “My grant proposals came back basically saying, ‘What are you smoking?’ ” The woman from Florida laughed heartily, her parrot earrings bobbing.

Pepperberg, who is fifty-nine years old, has imposing cheekbones and an abundance of long, dark hair; she wears smoky eye makeup, short skirts, and an armful of silver bangles. In Wheaton, she quietly worked the crowd into a pleasurable state of shared outrage. At one point, she said that colleagues had admonished her, “Birds can’t do what you say he can do. They just don’t have the brainpower.” Linnea Faris, a woman from Michigan who was wearing a “Remember Alex” T-shirt, shook her head in disbelief. Faris told me, “My husband doesn’t really understand it. I can’t fully explain it myself. But I’ve spent hours crying over that damn bird.” She went on, “People used to think birds weren’t intelligent. Well, they used to think women weren’t intelligent, either. They talked about the smaller circumference of our skulls as though it made us inferior to men! You know what? They were wrong on both counts.”

Pepperberg has had an unconventional academic career: she rents a small lab at Brandeis, and holds a part-time lecturer position at Harvard. That afternoon, she was delivering what she calls her “It’s a Wonderful Life” speech, so named because it’s about how surprised and touched she was to learn, after Alex died, that he had meant so much to people. “You all are my Clarences,” she said, referring to the angel who shows Jimmy Stewart the sorry state of a Bedford Falls without him in it.

It wasn’t just parrot people who had found themselves moved by Pepperberg’s three-decade relationship with Alex: obituaries of the bird ran everywhere from The Economist to the Hindustan Times. Within a few days of his death, Pepperberg told the audience, she had received some six thousand messages of condolence via e-mail.

As everyone knows, parrots are remarkably good at mimicking human speech, but they tend to repeat randomly picked-up phrases: obscenities, election slogans, “Hey, sailor.” Many parrots kept as pets also imitate familiar sounds, like the family dog barking or an alarm clock beeping. But Pepperberg taught Alex referential speech—labels for objects, and phrases like “Wanna go back.” By the end, he knew about fifty words for objects. Pepperberg was never particularly interested in teaching Alex language for its own sake; rather, she was interested in what language could reveal about the workings of his mind. In learning to speak, Alex showed Pepperberg that he understood categories like same and different, bigger and smaller. He could count and recognize Arabic numerals up to six. He could identify objects by their color, shape (“three-corner,” “four-corner,” and so on, up to “six-corner”), and material: when Pepperberg held up, say, a pompom or a wooden block, he could answer “Wool” or “Wood,” correctly, about eighty per cent of the time. Holding up a yellow key and a green key of the same size, Pepperberg might ask Alex to identify a difference between them, and he’d say, “Color.” When she held up two keys and asked, “Which is bigger?,” he could identify the larger one by naming its color. Looking at a collection of objects that he hadn’t seen before, Alex could reliably answer a two-tiered question like “How many blue blocks?”—a tricky task for toddlers. He even seemed to develop an understanding of absence, something akin to the concept of zero. If asked what the difference was between two identical blue keys, Alex learned to reply, “None.” (He pronounced it “nuh.”)

Pepperberg also reported that, outside training sessions, Alex sometimes played with the sounds he had learned, venturing new words. After he learned “gray,” he came up with “grain” on his own, and after learning “talk” he tried out “chalk.” His trainers then gave him the item that he had inadvertently named, and it eventually entered his vocabulary. (When Alex devised nonsense words—like “cheenut”—Pepperberg and his other trainers did not respond, and he quickly stopped saying them.) In linguistic terms, Alex was recombining phonemes, the building blocks of speech. Stephen Anderson, a Yale linguist who has written about animal communication, considers this behavior “apparent evidence that Alex did actually regard at least some of his words as made up of individual recombinable pieces, though it’s hard to say without more evidence. This is something that seems well beyond any ape-language experiments, or anything we see in nature.”

Pepperberg told me that Alex also made spontaneous remarks that were oddly appropriate. Once, when she rushed in the lab door, obviously harried, Alex said, “Calm down”—a phrase she had sometimes used with him. “What’s your problem?” he sometimes demanded of a flustered trainer. When training sessions dragged on, Alex would say, “Wanna go back”—to his cage. More creatively, he’d sometimes announce, “I’m gonna go away now,” and either turn his back to the person working with him or sidle as far away as he could get on his perch. “Say better,” he chided the younger parrots that Pepperberg began training along with him. “You be good, see you tomorrow, I love you,” he’d say when she left the lab each evening. This was endearing—and the Times’ obituary made much of the fact that these were the bird’s last words—although, as Anderson points out, it was during such moments that Alex was, most likely, merely “parroting.” It helped Alex’s charisma quotient that he made all his remarks in an intonation that was part two-year-old, part Rain Man, part pull-string toy. His voice, at once tinny and sweet, was easy to understand. Pepperberg tended to speak to Alex in the singsong “motherese” that doting parents use with young children, and he replied in a voice that seemed to convey a toddlerish pride.

Diana Reiss, a professor of cognitive psychology at Hunter College, is a dolphin researcher and a friend of Pepperberg’s. (She was a co-author of the first studies to show that dolphins and elephants, like some primates, recognize themselves in a mirror.) Reiss recalls that when she first met Alex “I was left alone with this bird I’d never seen. And I’m not really a bird person. Irene had said, ‘Just do what you want with him.’ After a few minutes, he said, ‘Wanna go knee.’ So I put out my hand, and he walked onto my knee. Then he said, ‘Tickle,’ and he put his head down to be tickled. I thought, I’m communicating with this bird! This is amazing! Then I thought, O.K., I’ll test him. I knew Irene’s paradigm. I knew she’d hold an object up really close to his beak. So I pick up a little red toy car and ask, ‘What’s this?,’ and out he comes with ‘Truck.’ Now, if I were unconsciously cuing him with, say, subvocal speech—some subtle movement of my vocal cords or lips—I’d have said, ‘Car.’ But the label Alex had learned was ‘truck.’ The whole encounter knocked my socks off.”

All children grow up in a world of talking animals. If they don’t come to know them through fairy tales, Disney movies, or the Narnia books, they discover them some other way. A child will grant the gift of speech to the family dog, or to the stray cat that shows up at the door. At first, it’s a solipsistic fantasy—the secret sharer you can tell your troubles to, or that only you understand. Later, it’s rooted in a more philosophical curiosity, the longing to experience the ineffable interiority of some very different being. My eight-year-old daughter says that she wishes the horses she rides could talk, just so she could ask them what it feels like to be a horse. Such a desire presumes—as Thomas Nagel put it in his 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”—that animals have some kind of subjectivity, and that it might somehow be plumbed. In any case, Nagel explained, humans are “restricted to the resources” of our own minds, and since “those resources are inadequate to the task,” we cannot really imagine what it is like to be a bat, only, at best, what it is like to behave like one—to fly around in the dark, gobble up insects, and so on. That inability, however, should not lead us to dismiss the idea that animals “have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.” We simply can’t know. Yet many of us would be glad for even a few glimpses inside an animal’s mind. And some people, like Irene Pepperberg, have dedicated their lives to documenting those glimpses.

Pepperberg will never really know what it is like to be a parrot, and she is careful not to claim that Alex learned a language. She calls what he learned a “two-way communication system,” and prefers the more conservative term “labels,” rather than “words,” to describe his vocabulary. “I wouldn’t say it was as much conversation as you’d have with a five-year-old,” she said when I asked her about Alex’s limits. “But maybe with a two-year-old. It wasn’t like he was going to say, ‘Hi, how are you, how was your day?’ But if you came in and asked him what he wanted, where he wanted to go, and asked him questions within the context of labels he knew, you could talk to him.”

At the Bird Expo, she told a story about the time an accountant was working on some tax forms near Alex’s cage, and was more or less ignoring him. Peering down at the visitor, he asked her, “Wanna nut?” No, she said, not looking up. Want some water? No. A banana? No. And so on, through his repertoire of nameable desires. At last, Alex asked, in a tone in which it was hard not to detect a note of impatience, “What do you want?”

For centuries, the idea of intelligent animals struck most intelligent people as ridiculous. In 1637, René Descartes marvelled that all humans—“without even excepting idiots”—can “arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts, while there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same.” Two centuries later, Charles Darwin took a radically different view. The theory of evolution suggested that men and animals were separated not by an unbridgeable mental gulf but, rather, by developmental gradations. In “The Descent of Man,” Darwin contended that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in mental faculties.” Chimps, he noted, used tools, and dogs had a capacity for abstraction—a poodle, seeing a German shepherd in the distance, knows it to be a fellow-canine. Discussing language, Darwin observed:

That which distinguishes man from the lower animals is not the understanding of articulate sounds, for, as everyone knows, dogs understand many words and sentences. In this respect they are at the same stage of development as infants, between the ages of ten and twelve months, who understand many words and short sentences, but cannot yet utter a single word. It is not the mere articulation which is our distinguishing character, for parrots and other birds possess this power. Nor is it the mere capacity of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas; for it is certain that some parrots, which have been taught to speak, connect unerringly words with things, and persons with events. The lower animals differ from man solely in his almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.

Darwin undermined these observations, however, with romantic overreaching about emotion in animals—he even made a claim for parental affection among earwigs. In 1881, Darwin’s protégé George Romanes went still further; his book “Animal Intelligence” compiled hundreds of anthropomorphizing anecdotes about uxorious ostriches, passionate pike, and prudent alligators. Such excesses inspired a backlash. In 1894, the British psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan established what came to be known as Morgan’s canon: “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.” If instinct could explain why your dog growled at your suitcase, then there was no need to cast about for a richer interpretation, one that might, as Morgan put it, “savour of the prattle of the parlour tea table rather than the sober discussion of the study.” As sensible as Morgan’s canon sounded, it essentially censored the question “Do animals think?”

The reigning theory for the new era of animal studies—especially in America—was the behaviorism of John Watson and B. F. Skinner. It was firmly rooted in the laboratory, in psychology rather than in biology departments, in the metaphor of animal as machine, and in the use of mazes and the Skinner box. Behaviorists tested the capacities of animals not through naturalistic observation but through highly controlled stimulus response experiments. Speculation about the subjective experiences or thought processes of animals seemed unscientific: animals didn’t think, they reacted. As Gregory Radick writes in “The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate About Animal Language” (2007), the idea of animal cognition “came to be regarded as belonging to the sentimental . . . nineteenth century.”

Meanwhile, the tale of the horse Clever Hans gave a chill to any scientist still hoping to demonstrate that animals were thinking creatures. Around the turn of the century, Wilhelm von Osten, a German schoolmaster, bought a horse, named it Hans, and supposedly taught him arithmetic—addition, subtraction, even fractions and decimals—along with some spoken and written German. When von Osten asked Hans, for example, “What is twelve divided by three?,” Hans tapped his hoof four times. Von Osten gave regular demonstrations of his horse’s astonishing abilities, until a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst pointed out that von Osten was unconsciously cuing the animal with subtle movements of his head and eyes. One lesson to have drawn from this episode was that, although Hans may not have been so clever at arithmetic, he was, in fact, quite clever at reading the body language of humans, a talent that could have warranted further investigation. Another—and this was the one that took—was that anybody studying animal communication had to be extremely careful about accidental cuing.

By the mid-nineteen-sixties, the behaviorist paradigm was being challenged by the field of ethology, which emphasized the role of instincts and of underlying biology, and relied more on naturalistic observation of animals than on laboratory experiments. A prominent Harvard zoologist named Donald Griffin—he had discovered that bats navigate through echolocation—began pushing his colleagues to acknowledge that animals had thoughts and emotions. He wrote, “The customary view of animals as always living in a state comparable to that of human sleepwalkers is a sort of negative dogmatism.” Wasn’t it possible that a chimpanzee who scoured the rain forest for a chunk of granite, then used it to crack open a nut, was consciously thinking about that tasty morsel inside, rather than executing rote movements? And did we really know enough to say whether animals had consciousness or not?

In the late seventies, the ethologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney reported some of the first evidence of what appeared to be a referential communication system among animals. Cheney and Seyfarth had gone to Kenya to study the vervet monkey, which is hunted by multiple predators—pythons, leopards, and eagles. The vervets, it seemed, had developed alarm calls that referred to specific predators—a phenomenon that Cheney and Seyfarth were able to demonstrate by playing recordings of the calls, and watching what the monkeys did upon hearing them. If the call was the one for “Python!,” they stood on their hind legs and started looking for it; if the call was “Leopard!,” the vervets climbed the nearest tree; if they were already in a tree and they heard “Eagle!,” they scrambled for the bushes.

For some researchers, though, the vital question was not so much “Can animals talk to each other?” as “Can they talk to us?” In the fifties, a chimp named Viki, who had been raised by a psychologist and his wife in their Florida home, and treated as much like a human child as possible, was taught to say four words—“mama,” “papa,” “cup,” and “up”—in a hoarse whisper. And, in the late sixties, Beatrice and Allen Gardner, researchers at the University of Nevada, decided to teach a chimp American Sign Language. Chimps, they reasoned, were notably expressive with their hands, and so a gestural language would probably be easier for them to adopt than a spoken one. The Gardners’ success with a chimp named Washoe—she reportedly learned nearly three hundred signs before her death, last year—ushered in a busy era of ape-language studies. In the seventies and eighties, Koko the gorilla, Kanzi the bonobo, and the mischievously named Nim Chimpsky all became simian celebrities. (Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist, has argued that language is the exclusive endowment of Homo sapiens.) The ape studies seemed to appeal to a vague hope that animals might be gurus of sorts, offering humankind a salutary humbling. Francine Patterson, a California-based researcher who worked with Koko, published popular children’s books about the gorilla and her love of felines (“soft good cat cat,” Koko once signed), and Nim Chimpsky made appearances on “Sesame Street” and on David Susskind’s talk show.

The prominent ape studies tended to be time-consuming and strife-ridden—Nim was quite a biter, with the attention span of, well, a chimpanzee—and the results were mixed. Several apes acquired respectable vocabularies, but, unlike most toddlers, they did not learn to produce sentences combining more than two or three words. (A few did seem to comprehend more complicated sentences: Kanzi, who communicates with the aid of a keyboard, reportedly can distinguish, for instance, between the commands “Make the doggie bite the snake” and “Make the snake bite the doggie”—don’t worry, these were toys.) When the apes did combine words, the second word was often a nongrammatical intensifier, as in “open hurry.” And, when they produced a longer utterance, it tended to be a string of repetitions of the sort rarely encountered outside a Gertrude Stein poem. (A quote from Nim Chimpsky: “Give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.”)

In 1979, Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University who initiated the Nim Chimpsky research, published an article in Science in which he essentially declared the project a failure. Nim knew individual words, and, like Hans the horse, he responded ably to his teachers’ cues, but he wasn’t really using language. In 1980, a conference in New York seemed to seal Terrace’s verdict. Called “The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People,” it was convened by the semiotician Thomas Sebeok, who invited a magician, the Amazing Randi, and an expert on the psychology of circus animals to make the point that animal-language studies involved an element of deception. Diana Reiss, the dolphin researcher, attended the conference and first met Pepperberg there. Reiss remembers it as a strange and disheartening gathering, in which “Sebeok started off by saying that asking whether animals had language was like asking if elephants could fly.”

In the aftermath of the conference, an aura of failure and even chicanery clung to animal-language studies. This was unfortunate, Stephen Anderson suggests in his 2004 book, “Dr. Dolittle’s Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language.” The ape-language projects, however flawed, had demonstrated abilities that “had not been previously suspected and about which it would be exciting to learn more.” Did apes acquire full-blown expressive language? No. Could they learn to communicate their wants and needs? Yes. Poignantly, even after Nim had been retired to a Texas ranch where most of the employees didn’t know sign language, he continued to sign. According to a new book, “Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human,” by Elizabeth Hess, when Bob Ingersoll, an old teacher of Nim’s, came to visit him, the chimp, who was in a cage at the time, eagerly signed “Bob,” “out,” and “key.” And, when Nim was joined at the ranch by another chimp, Sally, with whom he became quite close, he taught her signs for a couple of his favorite things, such as “gum” and “banana,” and signed “sorry” after a quarrel. As Reiss told me, “Nim Chimpsky learned a lot—just not, perhaps, language.”

When Irene Pepperberg went to New York for the Clever Hans conference, she was thirty-one, and had owned Alex for three years. She had arrived in the world of animal communication from “out of left field,” as Diana Reiss puts it. Pepperberg has a Ph.D. from Harvard in theoretical chemistry, not psychology or zoology. But in the midst of her thesis work, which involved modelling chemical-reaction rates, it suddenly hit her, she recalls, that “(a) we don’t know enough at this point to do this exactly right and (b) in the future, what it’s taking me seven years to do with a mathematical model is going to take a computer hours, or seconds.” She decided to pursue something different. In any case, the prospects for women in her field hadn’t been encouraging. Speaking of her class at Harvard, she recalled, “My year was the first year that graduate-school draft deferrals for men were cut way back. So they let in a lot of women for a change. But the women were asked in their job interviews things like ‘What kind of birth control are you using?’ ”

In 1974, Pepperberg watched two programs on PBS, one about Washoe and one about dolphin and whale intelligence. “And it sort of clicked for me that this was real science, that you could be a scientist and study this,” she said. “I didn’t want to give up science—I loved the scientific method.” She also realized that “nobody was doing this kind of research with birds.” Pepperberg suspected that this was a mistake, because, unlike apes, some birds were proficient at mimicking human speech. And, based on personal experience, she felt certain that birds could be smart.

Pepperberg was born in 1949, and grew up in an apartment above a store in Brooklyn. She was an only child. Her father, Robert Platzblatt, was a frustrated biochemist who passed on his love of science, bringing home “The Microbe Hunters” and biographies of Marie Curie for his daughter to read. But, when Irene was little, her father was simultaneously teaching middle school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, studying for his master’s degree, and taking care of his sick mother. “He’d wake me up and kiss me good morning, and then sometimes I wouldn’t see him till the next morning,” she recalls. Her mother had been happy working as a junior bookkeeper before she had Irene, and resented staying home, as young mothers were expected to do in the fifties. “For me, there were no other children at home to play with, and for her there was no respite,” Pepperberg says.

When Pepperberg was four years old, her father bought her a budgie, to keep her company. She ended up owning a series of budgies, and training them all to speak, at least a little; when she went off to M.I.T. as an undergraduate, one of the birds went with her to her dorm room.

Despite her graduate-school epiphany at Harvard, she continued with her Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry, receiving her degree in 1976; but she also started attending courses in departments relevant to the bird research she now hoped to do. “I was spending forty hours a week learning psychology and biology and forty hours finishing my doctorate,” she recalls. In 1977, her husband at the time, David Pepperberg, a neuroscientist, got a professorship at Purdue University, and they moved to Indiana. Pepperberg started looking around for a parrot—preferably an African gray. Among parrot owners, grays have a reputation for being good talkers, and Pepperberg had come across German studies that found them to be adept at numerical and other cognitive tasks. Meanwhile, some recent theorizing about animal intelligence had suggested that the important factor was not absolute brain size but brain size relative to body weight—and on that score, the so-called “encephalization quotient,” “birds were surprisingly high up there,” Pepperberg said. In her 1999 book, “The Alex Studies,” published by Harvard, Pepperberg writes about becoming excited by an idea that Donald Griffin, the zoologist, had articulated; namely, that “researchers might benefit from studying animals the way that anthropologists study a previously undiscovered primitive tribe.” He recommended that scholars attempt “to establish two-way communication and use this communication to determine how they process information and interpret the events in their world.”

In 1977, Pepperberg went to a Chicago-area pet store and bought a thirteen-month-old African gray parrot for six hundred dollars. Like all African grays of the Congo subspecies, he was the color of a storm cloud and about a foot tall, with a shiny, scimitar-shaped black beak, a white face, and a lipstick-red tail. She named him Alex. (Luckily for science, when she and her husband divorced, twenty years later, David Pepperberg suggested that she keep the parrot and he keep the dog.)

Pepperberg wasn’t sure how to train Alex, although she knew that she didn’t want to pursue a behaviorist model. These paradigms had been tried on talking birds, with poor results. (In one 1967 experiment, mynah birds were placed in soundproof boxes where they heard tape-recorded words, followed by the dispensing of food pellets; the birds did not learn to mimic the words. Meanwhile, mynahs that had been left out of the experiment, and turned into pets by the lab assistants, talked fluently.) To Pepperberg, the Skinnerian approach made no sense: “I mean, you don’t take a preschooler and put him in a Skinner box! You give him all this enrichment and social interaction.” In some ways, a smart bird wasn’t so different. Gray parrots are social animals. In the wild, they settle down for the night in roosts with hundreds of other parrots, forage for food in small groups, may have a dominance hierarchy, and mate for life. For mates, imitating one another is a big part of their vocalizing. With their mates, they sing—or squawk—a duet that is unique to that couple. “A single parrot in the wild is a dead parrot,” Pepperberg said. “It cannot forage and look for predators at the same time. I was in Australia a number of years ago, and there was this little juvenile rosella at the top of the trees, screaming its head off. Your first reaction is, It’s screaming its head off, it’s gonna be eaten. And your second reaction is, It might be eaten, but it’s got to find its flock.”

Pepperberg was further influenced by two papers, one by the primatologist Alison Jolly, in 1966, and one by the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, in 1976. In different ways, both made the novel argument that the evolutionary pressures fostering intelligence in animals were not the primal demands of subsistence but the more abstract ones of living within a complex social hierarchy. The more intricate the social system, the more evolution would select for intelligence. Pepperberg noted that longevity also played a role. The longer a bird lived, the more it would have to remember—not only about which birds in the flock could dominate which other birds but also about “which trees are blossoming and fruiting, and which trees have died and which paths have now been taken over by leopards, and where the elephants are now going to make their wallows, so it can go and get water.”

Pepperberg needed a method for teaching a parrot that played to its particular strengths. She came across something called the model/rival technique, which a German ethologist named Dietmar Todt had tried in a 1975 study of parrots. Todt had reasoned that, since parrots learn to squawk by watching each other vocalize, they might be able to learn German by observing people talk. So he developed a system in which one person was the trainer and one was the model for the bird—and its rival for the trainer’s attention. Pepperberg tweaked the protocol: in her version, the model/rival and the trainer periodically exchanged roles, so the bird could see that one person wasn’t always in charge. Parrots started the process by learning referential labels for things they wanted, rather than dialogues of the “Hello, how are you? I am fine” variety, which, Pepperberg figured, didn’t mean much to a parrot. There were no extrinsic rewards. If the parrot named an object, he’d get to play with that object, and, if he didn’t want it, he got the right to ask for something else. Pepperberg explained, “Let’s say you’re the model/rival and I’m the trainer. I have this object that the bird wants, and I show it to you and I say”—she adopted a singsong voice—“ ‘What’s this?,’ and you say, ‘Cork.’ I say, ‘That’s right,’ and you say, ‘Cork, cork, cork,’ while you’re holding it and the bird is practically falling off the perch because he wants it. And he hears that this weird noise is what mediated the transfer of this object. So we change roles, and then, instead of saying ‘Cork,’ I go, ‘Raaaawkk,’ ”—an uncannily accurate screech—“and you go, ‘No, no, you’re wrong,’ so the bird sees that not just any weird noise transfers the cork.”

The system worked. At first, a parrot might make a sound more like “erk” than “cork.” He’d need practice. Certain sounds are nearly impossible to produce without lips—Alex was never able to say “purple,” for instance, even after he nailed all his other colors. Still, as Reiss says, “Irene really found the appropriate method based on what we know about these birds. If you can tap into what these birds do in their own environment—in this case, the way these birds pair-bond—then you can set up a powerful learning paradigm.”

As it happens, the model/rival method may have some utility for another species: humans. Diane Sherman, who works with autistic children in Monterey, California, has had some preliminary success in encouraging speech in her clients using Pepperberg’s protocol. In an article published in The International Journal of Comparative Psychology, Sherman and Pepperberg say that, in two studies of children in Sherman’s private practice, the model/rival method led to “significant gains” in the children’s “communication and social interaction with peers and adults.” (Behavioral changes were measured by reports from parents and teachers, and included criteria like demonstrations of empathy, improved eye contact, saying hello to people, and speaking in sentences.)

When Pepperberg started publishing papers on Alex, Reiss recalls, many of her colleagues were nonplussed: “I can remember being at a psychology conference in the early eighties where Irene was giving a paper about Alex, and people were saying, ‘I see it but I don’t believe it.’ A lot of the work being presented was pretty Skinnerian and I remember that, at her talk, some people in the back row got up and walked out. Now she gets a radically different reception. I was at a comparative-cognition conference recently, and many of those same people were there. And I heard a number of people talking about Irene’s work and referring to it as groundbreaking.”

A few weeks after Pepperberg’s speech at the Bird Expo, I saw her in a more properly scientific guise, teaching an undergraduate seminar and an evening extension course on animal cognition at Harvard. At the evening course, she lectured about one of her favorite subjects—the songbirds known as oscines, which learn their melodies much like human children learn language. They have an innate predisposition to learn song; they have an initial period of babbling; they have specific brain areas for song-learning, just as we have for speech; and they have a sensitive phase in childhood for acquiring song, just as humans have for acquiring language. The parallel is striking, Pepperberg told her students, partly because so few other species actually learn to communicate vocally, as opposed to making primal sounds instinctually. “Besides humans, it’s dolphins and certain birds—and maybe, we think now, elephants,” she said.

An innate predisposition isn’t enough for oscine songbirds to learn their repertoire, Pepperberg said. They need tutoring from members of their own species—usually, from their fathers or the dominant males in their flock, since it is males who tend to sing, in order to attract mates or defend territory. Pepperberg spoke of songbirds with prodigious repertoires—the adult brown thrasher can sing two thousand songs. In a voice that had a faint trace of her native Brooklyn, she said, “You can raise some birds in social isolation and give them audiotapes of their own species singing, but it doesn’t work very well. And, if you keep them alone in a little tiny box during their sensitive phase, they will sing, but it will be a kind of tentative, crummy song.” She urged her students to “go out and listen to the dawn chorus. It’s cacophony. A beautiful cacophony, but nonetheless.” She argued that, in order for a songbird to recognize the music of its own species, it must be able to make distinctions between same and different—just as Alex did.

In speaking about animal intelligence, Pepperberg has tried to strike a balance between what the ecologist James Gould has called “the unprofitable extremes of blinding skepticism and crippling romanticism.” Pepperberg has published widely in peer-reviewed scientific journals, even as she raises funds for her research with a Web site that sells adorable Alex tote bags, key chains, and mugs.

Still, for many years, Pepperberg felt that she and Alex were, in intellectual terms, out on a limb. In the past decade, though, dozens of studies have buttressed Pepperberg’s claims about avian intelligence. Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, as Pepperberg often observed. Yet Nathan Emery, a cognitive biologist at the University of London, points out that, “in relation to their body size, parrots have brains as big as those of chimpanzees.” Emery has taken to calling certain of the brighter birds the “feathered apes in your garden.” And Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University, argues that avian brains, long regarded as primitive, are not so different from mammalian brains after all. Birds, Jarvis explains, “have a cortical region that developed, in fact, from the same substrate as in humans.” Soon enough, “birdbrain” may no longer be a viable insult.

One important set of studies centers on the clever corvid family of birds, which includes crows, ravens, jays, and magpies. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that crows or ravens often appear as cunning tricksters and problem-solvers in Native American legends and Aesop’s fables.) A 1998 study suggested that these birds have a surprising capacity for “episodic-like memory.” Scrub jays hide food and retrieve it later, and in the study the birds were allowed to cache two kinds of food: peanuts and wax-moth larvae, which they much prefer (though only when the larvae are fresh). Some of the jays were then sent to their cages for four hours, and some for five days, after which they were given access to their stashes. The birds that were released first went for the larvae, while the ones let out later settled for the peanuts, apparently having remembered not only when and where they had hidden their food but how long it took for the larvae to go bad. Further studies noted that, if a scrub jay realized that it was being spied on by another jay as it cached its food, it was more likely to come back later and hide the goodies elsewhere. Moreover, jays that had previously stolen from another’s stash were more prone to move their food to a different hiding place. (It takes a thief to know one, apparently.) Such behavior suggests that jays not only have a Machiavellian streak; they also possess a “theory of mind,” and can guess, to some degree, what other birds are thinking. The husband-and-wife team of Nicola Clayton and Nathan Emery, who are largely responsible for this work, argue that it shows some birds have “the same cognitive tool kit” that apes have: “causal reasoning, flexibility, imagination, and prospection.” They believe that evolution created multiple paths to intelligence—and that “complex cognitive abilities had evolved multiple times in distantly related species.”

Alex Kacelnik, a professor at Oxford, studies another corvid, the New Caledonian crow, which has a rare ability to make tools (a talent once thought to be limited to primates). It will tear a strip off a leaf, and then use the strip to poke into insect-harboring crevices. In 2002, Kacelnik and his colleagues presented a group of birds with the challenge of making a tool, with a material not found in nature, to solve a novel problem. In one room, which the birds could enter freely, was a length of wire and a cylindrical container that had something tasty, like a piece of pig’s heart, at the bottom. One of the crows, a female named Betty, figured out how to bend the wire with her beak, so as to fashion a hook for retrieving the meat. Did Betty look at the wire and have an insight about what to do? Not exactly. “The crows don’t fully understand what they are doing,” Kacelnik told me. “And yet neither can you say it’s explainable as purely mechanical repetition.” To insure that Betty wasn’t somehow acting on instinct, Kacelnik and his colleagues “gave her a task that was the opposite. We gave her a piece of metal that was bent so it was too short. Would she be clever enough to unbend it? She was. So that implied some understanding of the physical requirements of the task.” Though some crows, like Betty, cracked the challenge quickly, others took many tries; still others never mastered it. Watching videos of Betty on Kacelnik’s Web site, I noticed that she seemed to have a particularly focussed and alert way about her. Even Kacelnik, who is loath to anthropomorphize, confessed to me, “An element of our finding that still puzzles me is that while Betty was not chosen or treated in any special way, she was different. She showed a readiness to coöperate and solve problems that none of the other animals in our study have replicated. We have no idea why.”

How representative are Betty and Alex of their species? For science, one remarkable bird is not enough. Kacelnik told me, “We study multiple animals for a reason: if you want to characterize a species, you need to try similar ideas on different subjects, to examine how much is due to exceptional circumstances and how much is a property of your method and your experiments.” I asked him why more researchers weren’t working with African grays, trying to replicate Pepperberg’s achievements with Alex. “The problem with these animals is that they are the opposite of fruit flies,” he said, meaning that parrots live a long time—often, fifty to sixty years in captivity. “Alex was still learning when he died, and he was thirty.” He later elaborated: “Irene’s work could not really have been planned ahead, as nobody knew what was possible. . . . Alex’s development as a unique animal accompanied Irene’s as a unique scientist. Hers is not a career trajectory one would advise to young scientists—it’s too risky.”

Pepperberg told me that there are now a few groups of researchers studying cognition in African grays: one group in Prague, where the parrots are learning Czech; one in Milan, where they are learning Italian; and one outside Paris, where they are studying “referential communication” that does not involve language. In the end, though, it may be Pepperberg herself who has the greatest drive and capacity to replicate her own work, although she has suffered from funding shortfalls; over the decades, she has received eight grants from the National Science Foundation, but she does a lot of fund-raising on her own. At the Brandeis lab, she is training and testing her two remaining parrots, Griffin and Arthur. Griffin, who is thirteen, shows more promise than Arthur, who is nine. Both seem shyer and less confident than Alex. Pepperberg’s lab manager, Arlene Levin, describes Griffin as “a timid guy, and a plucker.” (Anxious parrots pluck out their feathers.) And Griffin grew up in Alex’s shadow; he was the one whom Alex interrupted and corrected—“Say better,” “Pay attention,” “Bad parrot.” Griffin currently knows about a dozen words for objects; Alex knew fifty. “I’m not saying that Griffin won’t get there,” Pepperberg told me. “I think he will. He’s smart. It’s just a matter of convincing him that, no, Alex is not going to give you the answer. Don’t just sit there waiting!” She admits that there’s pressure on her, too: “It’s important to show that Alex was not some unique individual.”

Even Nathan Emery, the cognitive biologist, who is otherwise admiring of Pepperberg’s work, thinks it is possible that Alex might have been an exceptionally bright bird. Pepperberg notes that she picked him at random at the pet store, precisely to forestall the suspicion that she’d gone hunting for the avian Einstein. She says, “I think that what made Alex special was that, for the first fifteen years of his life, he was an only bird, and he had people with him talking with him eight hours a day—interacting with him, treating him like a toddler. When he said something, you reacted in some way or another, so he learned that his vocalizations could control the environment.”

Clive Wynne, an animal psychologist at the University of Florida, is suspicious of most animal-communication projects. (He writes papers with titles like “The Perils of Anthropomorphism” and “Pets Aren’t Us.”) He is no less dubious about Pepperberg’s work. “An African gray parrot is an expensive pet, but it’s not expensive compared with, say, a dolphin, which costs tens of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Why is Alex the only parrot in the history of parrotdom to have done these things? If there’s really something going on here—I mean, he lived thirty years—then somebody else, somewhere along the line, would have replicated this. If we really want this to be science and not just some sort of adjunct to the entertainment industry, we shouldn’t be relying on one animal.”

Last month, I visited Pepperberg and her two remaining birds at Brandeis. Her lab is a windowless, fluorescent-lit room, ten feet by fifteen feet, with white cement walls. One wall is lined with shelves stacked with bags of nuts and kibbles, boxes of bite-size Shredded Wheat, and plastic jars full of colored wooden blocks, plastic letters, and pompoms. There are newspapers on the floor, and three big cages, one of them empty. Alex, it’s clear, was not simply a pet or a laboratory subject. For thirty years, he was the center of Pepperberg’s life: a little like a child, a little like a significant other, very much like a collaborator. When Alex died—a technician discovered his body—she was devastated. “I always felt I was working toward the next stage with him,” she told me. “And I thought I had at least a decade more.” When two close friends of Pepperberg’s—a nuclear-submarine commander named Carl Hartsfield and his wife, Leigh Ann—heard the news, they drove up from Washington, D.C., along with their own African gray, Pepper, to be with her.

My first glimpse of Griffin made me glad that I’m not a parrot who has to identify my life’s mate in a flock. Griffin, who was shuffling down one side of his cage in a parroty version of the Electric Slide, looked just like the photographs of Alex that I’d seen, and just like Arthur, who was over in a corner, quietly preening. Griffin is named, in part, for Donald Griffin, and in part for the gryphon he reminded Pepperberg of when she first bought him—“He was all talons and beak.” Now he’s grown into himself, and, when he’s not plucking, is full-feathered and handsome, just like Alex. I did notice that, when Griffin spoke, his voice was softer than the Great One’s, which is preserved on dozens of YouTube clips.

One of the odd things about observing Griffin speak was the contrast between his face—goggle-eyed and masklike, and much less expressive than a dog’s—and his ability to make his wishes clear. “Wanna go chair,” Griffin said, and Arlene Levin, the lab manager, picked him up and placed him on a perch next to her office chair. Then Levin showed me a little of what the new boy could do. “What matter?” she asked, holding up a small block of wood close to Griffin’s beak, so he could tap it if he wanted. This was how the parrots were queried about what material an object is made of.

“Wood,” Griffin said.

“You want the wood?”

Griffin didn’t pick up the block.

“What do you want?”

“Nut.” Griffin was given an almond, and he snarfed it down.

“What matter?” Levin asked, holding a stone.

“Rrrr-ock,” Griffin said.

“Want the rock?”

No—he wanted another nut. (Nuts are offered only in training sessions.)

“What color?” Levin asked, showing him a plastic cup.

“Green,” Griffin announced correctly, in an uninflected tone, and then “yellow” when shown another cup.

A while later, two Brandeis undergraduates, Shannon Cabell and Michelle Barras, came in to do a training session, and it didn’t go quite as smoothly. Pepperberg was sitting at a desk in the corner, thumbing through the latest issue of Animal Cognition. The two young women were perched on tall stools, and Griffin was on a perch across from them.

“What shape?” Cabell asked. She had to repeat it four or five times, as Griffin wasn’t saying a thing.

From the corner, Pepperberg instructed, “All right, model it for him.” Cabell picked up a square object and asked Barras what shape she was holding. With a theatrical display of pride, Barras responded, “Four-corner!”

“Right,” Cabell said. “She’s such a good bird. She gets a four-corner for that.”

“What color?” Cabell asked about a yellow pompom, a material that the birds identify as wool.

“Wool,” Griffin chimed.

Pepperberg sighed, distractedly pulled a piece of sandwich bread out of a plastic bag on the shelf, and began eating it. “Right,” she told Griffin. “It’s wool. What color wool?”

“Yellow.” There were a few more exchanges like this, as well as some long silences during which Pepperberg murmured, “C’mon, Griffs,” and Barras said, “All these nuts can be yours.”

Watching this exchange, I indulged in my own anthropomorphic speculation—I imagined that Griffin was thinking that he’d like to be back where he was half an hour ago, sitting quietly in Pepperberg’s lap, having his head tickled.

Barras pulled out a green block and asked Griffin what color it was. The parrot stared at his feet.

“See if he’ll do it for a bean,” Pepperberg suggested. Barras took an orange jelly bean out of a bag. “No,” Pepperberg prompted. “A bean the same color.” Barras dug out a green one. In the fall, candy corn is the major training treat; in the winter, it’s candy hearts; in the spring, there are jelly beans; in the summer, the parrots get Skittles. “Half a jelly bean once in a while is acceptable for his diet,” Pepperberg told me. It’s also a powerful motivator.

“Green,” Griffin said immediately.

This parrot is good, even impressive. But he’s not Alex. Not yet. ♦

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